HUGE DISCLAIMER: The run involved a pair of Martyr Wraps picked up before descending, and I am a huge jackass who managed to forget to mention that. They almost won it on their own, despite my signature award winning criminaly sloppy gameplay.

Err, I just multi-fumbled my way out of a NC VT run. It's very much doable, and I would've done it too had I not messed up several times in a row right at the end. Had the prince down to death protections. It's also rather more preppable than you'd think.

Scum for wheytwut. I didn't scum because I found it, but it was integral and probably can't be done without. Also, the abovementioned Martyr Wraps, which would've won me the game if I wasn't playing like a complete dope... Othewise I really had nothing worth mentioning. Worst bonus subdungeon (monster zoo)

Anywho, knock goo blobs all over the place and pick up knocback, might on wall destruction and a million stoneskins untill you max out on magic res. Phys res should be 68% except if you run into the tower shield and have place for it. Prep to lvl from either 6 to 7 or 7 to 8 and go down below. Several options here I took the worst - a straigth up consensus into mystera (only unlocked her because there was nothing I needed from Binlor). I also picked body pact up for the final 7% phys res. I couldv'e just killed a boss by abusing knocback and all the upper walls (which I did with SMM anyway) and had enough piety to join whoever and THEN consensus out. Save popcorn for curse removal (as well as you can) and just abuse knocback - either smack bosses into walls for free might, or into one another to kick both at the same time (and fireball both to lower their regen while you explore). I had about 40-60 damage and would've done it if I didn't do any (just one) of the following due to being terminally rusty:

1) Converted the burn salve for no reason. Don't do this. The final boss has corrosion and not having a burn salve handy for EM desecration is just stupid.2) Took consensus right away instead of picking up a hundred or so piety from knocking SMM all over the upper portion of the map. This ment I had to desecrate for the conversion out of Mystera and it cost me too much.3) Opted to level up by fighting 3 lvl 7 guys (2 snakes which cost me my final health potion) a lvl 5 curse guy and alvl 3 curse guy) instead of just regen fighting the boss. Ended up costing me an unreasonable ammount of resources, and I had enough walls and exploration to kill the bastard and gained nothing.4) Wheytwutted the boss into a wrong spot where I couldn't knockback him any more while stil lhaving a million walls, no way to regen mana and being 1 mana short of a Wheytwut.6) Converting into Drac with no way to gain piety with him and nothing but sanguine to pick up, while GG would've let me wheytwut the boss again and kill him easily.

Additionaly, my life would've been easier if:

1) I explored the regular subdungeon at all.2) Scored just about any subdungeon except the monster zoo.

So in other words, if you can eficcently binlor down a level and get the resists, find wheytwut, abuse knocback down below and NOT GO FULL RETARDED at every opportunity, it's quite doable.

And here's one without wonnafyt. With wraps, though, but no fireball. I even had an extra bear mace which I didn't pick up for lack of inventory space. And I even converted the badge due to inventory space mismanagement. I grabbed an extra whoopaz and translocation seal from the spider temple, in retrospect, I would've done better with a compression seal.

Big changes were not making any stupid moves, and proper god shennanigans. I had quite a bad level composition topside (and no wheytwut hurts). So I went down with "only" 65 or so magic resist. I also brought an ENDISWAL down below to engineer room for smacking someone around (tricky compromises without wheytwut, cost me an extra Bear Mace O.O), but won me the game. I did score a handy dandy venom dagger. I filled up to 100 piety with Binlor, swapped to TT, picked up dodging and Tiki's Edge, consensused into mysterea and picked up Body Pact to up my resists to full. Then ground out the bosses carefully, some using walls (Goo Blob was tough, come to think of it, first wave was Frank, Goo and SMM), some by smacking them one into another. In the end I desecrated EM for some reason and drenk the salve (mid fight with the boss, the corrosion from the spider temple, martyr wraps and his attacks was adding up).

EDIT - Does anyone know what the status icon at the end of the topmost full row is? The blue one with "2"? Can't immagine what it is and where I picked it up. Unless there's an icon to tell you how many levels above 10 you got now.

ha, you nailed it The strat took the gorgon through the regular VGT (small modifications, but turned out to be hella strong, back when I was doing VGT trickshots).

The problem, however, I can't get the monk to work in VVGT. Or the gorgon. In theory, with either IMAWAL wall creation spam OR if the special slayer wand can be fired into an empty space so you can summon a monster, anyone with max resists, knockback and byceps/might on wall destruction could kick H. (anything's) ass pretty reliably.

But you can't possibly build up fast enough or without losing too much exploration. Or I can't at least. A miraculously resistant Half-Dragon could probably walk all over VVGT, but the "prep binlor scum pactmaker" thing runs out of either piety or walls for anyone except gorgon (or I'm rusty as hell).

Gorgon destroys VGT, but the lack of damage is too crippling for VT. And the whole binlor/body pact thing is by far the strongest strat I've tried out in there. Maybe I'm just not taking something into account (as usual). But Gorgon has poison strike AND instagib first strike which ignores RBS slow, and that's just something noone else has at their disposal, as far as I'm aware...

Agreed. The problem with Gaan-Telet is building up to max resists. It costs too much when you consider how many resources you need for Horratio and the higher floors of the tower. It's kind of hard to imagine anything being able to beat VVGT, but who knows. Stranger things have happened.

Ty Well, monks are a bit of a signature hero / last resort cheeze for me...

Waldo0 wrote:I also considered a knockback-poison monk, but I didn't clear with the monk.

BTW, I think my strategy is better .

Maybe we would too, if we knew what your strategy IS. And I'm curious as to what you mean by "better"? In what area?

Very little in this game, and under very specific circumstances, beats the monk for raw power. Especially in "endurance runs". He effectively starts with 2 maps worth of blackspace and his regen fighting capabilities put everything else to shame. And just about nothing I can think of beats Binlor for ease of use, ease of dismantling a level and damage boosts, and he can give more resists than any other god but pactmaker here and there. I've beaten old VGT with everything, and nothing came close to the monk in terms of resources left over (not even the Rogue, or a full resist crusader). And the monk, with his "death of a thousand hits" style can take Martyr Wraps from "not worth it" to "omgwtfbbq" level. He can also get the most out of Binlor knockback piety because he can slap a goo blob through 20 walls at lvl1 with minimum fuss.

So, what's stronger than that? I'm really curious. Because we've deconstructed the monk to scientific levels and more than a year of testing sort of postulate that if a monk can't do something it's likely nothing can most of the time. The ammount of debuffs and obstacles you need to put into a map to keep monk from running it over stops plenty of other classes dead in their tracks - and monk still wins. Case in point - monk gold. People find it hard, even hardest out of the gold challenges and the sad fact is that it used to be significantly harder and was still beaten by purist monks.

And no dev move ever got as much hate and moaning than the infamous monk nerf (when he lost 50% mag resist), and he still beats VTNC, and rather easily too. The result of that nerf? The entire game could be made significantly easier for other classes and now you can get full completions on pretty much all maps. What in the world is stronger than that?

Waldo0 wrote:Actually, I don't know whether I could clear the VVGT, because the map has much more variants than the NC.

Well, if you share the strat, I could probably point out stuff. I do have a bit of expirience in clearing it (VGT), y'know